The Morphing of a Folktale: Sallāma and the Priest

A legendary anecdote of early Islamic origins about a songstress attempting to seduce a pious man, a humorously moralizing tale that promotes sexual propriety and, more specifically, male resistance to the temptations of the female voice and body through its dramatic presentation of a Qurʾānic verse, has inspired a number of modern fictional works. Most of these adaptations expand and elaborate on the contents of the anecdote while remaining within the genre of narratives of sexual abstinence. The film Sallāma (1945), however, turns the songstress, played by Umm Kulthūm, into a chaste figure, and screenwriter Bayram al-Tūnisī reworks the ‘Sallāma and the Priest’ anecdote accordingly. The scene in the film which is based on the tale, and which culminates in Umm Kulthūmʹs incantation of Qurʾānic verses, does not warn against the temptations of the flesh associated with the female voice, but argues instead that womanʹs voice is not ʿawra. Womanʹs voice is not, in other words a ‘private part’ that should be concealed in the context of prayer, but rather a useful instrument of collective worship.